Nein!

A pious Protestant all his life, he was nevertheless fascinated by the spiritualism and rituals of the Catholic Church, and believed in the supernatural. Moral precepts played an established part in his life – though not as clearly defined a part as with Goerdeler or Beck. Canaris’s compass, unlike theirs, gave him a firm general direction of travel built on strong principles. But when it came to the application of these, he was serpentine, flexible and full of ruses and devices. A few meanderings here and there were of little consequence, provided his basic moral foundation remained uncompromised. His character was founded on a deep strain of ambivalence. One observer commented, ‘Canaris had a profound sense of adventure, including the adventure of evil itself.’ His was a mind capable of coping with paradox, and, in the right circumstances, he did not find it difficult to accept that ends could justify means, provided they were carefully chosen and judiciously applied.

One other unusual feature marked Canaris’s personality. He never looked back. What had gone had gone, and was of no consequence.The only thing that mattered to him was what was ahead.

Wilhelm Canaris had a gentle disposition. ‘He hated violence in itself,’ a friend noted. ‘[He] was repelled by war … [and had] an exaggerated love for animals. “Anyone who does not love dogs, I judge out of hand to be an evil man,” he once announced … I never witnessed in Canaris a trace of crudity or brutality … only sudden revelations of his deep-seated humanity.’ Another of his contemporaries noted that he was, in all his dealings and whatever the provocation, invariably ‘a kind person’. His wife Erika described him as a man of ‘tender emotions’.

Wilhelm Canaris

Politically, Canaris was a natural conservative. But his views were moderately held, and tempered always with an instinct for humanity and an internationalist world view. Later on, possibly under the influence of Goerdeler, he believed that after the war there should be a United States of Europe led by a triumvirate of Britain, France and Germany.

Physically, he was small and slight. Frequently mocked for his lack of stature by his classmates, he left school to enlist in the Imperial German Navy at the age of eighteen, later claiming that his choice of this career was due to his famous (but entirely unrelated) Greek ‘ancestor’.

The young Wilhelm Canaris first came to prominence in Germany (and Britain) as a result of a First World War game of hide-and-seek played out along the west coast of South America between the Royal Navy light cruiser HMS Glasgow and the German light cruiser Dresden, on which Canaris was a junior officer. On 14 March 1915 the Glasgow finally found the Dresden sheltering in a bay on an isolated island in Chilean waters. Following negotiations between the two warships, in which Canaris (who spoke excellent English and had a reputation for exquisite manners) was involved, the Dresden’s captain, realising he was cornered, opened her sea-cocks, scuttled his ship and surrendered his German crew to internment. Canaris, who also spoke perfect Spanish (he was said to be fluent in six languages) did not remain behind bars for long. On 4 August 1915 he escaped captivity and made his way disguised as a peasant by train, foot, boat and horseback over the Andes to Buenos Aires. From there, assuming the identity of a Chilean widower, ‘Señor Reed Rosas’, young Lieutenant Canaris took a slow boat home through, among other places, Falmouth (where he assisted British immigration officials with information on a fellow traveller). He finally arrived back in Germany on 30 September 1915.

Towards the end of that year, the slight figure of ‘Señor Reed Rosas’ turned up again, this time in Madrid, where he took out a lease on a flat not far from the German embassy. Wilhelm Canaris, alias Reed Rosas, alias ‘Carl’, codename ‘Kika’ (a childhood nickname which means ‘peeker’), was on a spying mission for his country.

Despite suffering recurrent bouts of malaria, exacerbated by the excessively hot summers and bleak winters of Madrid, Canaris found that his posting to Spain was the start of a love affair with the Iberian peninsula and its people that would last the rest of his life. ‘I like Italians, just as I like Greeks and Spaniards,’ he told a friend. ‘If a Spaniard gives me his word of honour, I place confidence in it. I am much more cautious towards the Greeks and especially the Italians. In Italy sincerity is often camouflaged behind different colours, like the slices on a Neapolitan cake.’

Ordered home through Italy, Canaris, still masquerading as Señor Rosas, and accompanied by a Spanish priest also travelling under a false identity, left Spain for France on 21 February 1916. Both men claimed to be travelling to Switzerland to take the cure for tuberculosis (an illness it was easy for Canaris to feign because of his malaria). After crossing the French–Italian border without difficulty, the pair headed for Domodossola on the Swiss–Italian border, thirty kilometres north of the Italian lakes.

By now, however, the French and the British had alerted the Italian border guards to look out for a Chilean passport in the name of Reed Rosas. The fugitives were arrested on 24 February, and summarily thrown into jail. An extensive period of interrogation in the none-too-gentle hands of Italian counter-intelligence followed, during which Canaris took to biting his lip so that he could convincingly spit blood to back up his claim to tuberculosis. Soon German and Chilean diplomatic wheels began to turn in Madrid. Under pressure from the Chilean government, the Italian authorities agreed not to hang the pair, and bundled them on board a freighter bound for Cartagena. On 15 March, Canaris arrived back in Madrid, emaciated, convulsed with shivering and racked with a roaring malarial fever.

The experience of being arrested, jailed, very nearly hanged and struck down with malaria ought to have put him off spying forever. But it didn’t. Over the next year he made the contacts and put together the spy networks in Spain and Portugal that would form the foundation of his later work on the Iberian peninsula during the 1930s and 40s.

He swiftly became a familiar of the shadowy demi-monde of spies, corrupt officials, bankers, money-launderers, arms traders, adventurers, and all the hangers-on who circle like scavengers around rotten meat in the neutral spaces of any conflict. Among these were two men who would be of special interest to him in the future. The first was Basil Zaharoff, a director of the British engineering company Vickers Armstrong, an occasional British agent and one of the world’s most notorious arms salesmen. The second was a Mallorcan fisherman and tobacco-smuggler called Juan March. March, whose fingers were in almost every dubious Iberian pie and who ended his life a very rich man because of it, was one of Canaris’s most important agents. According to rumour and the voluminous files held on him in the British National Archives, he also performed the same function for the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6), a fact of which both sides were probably very well aware.

In late 1916, with his work in Spain finished, Canaris made a second attempt to get back to Germany, finally reaching safe territory on 9 October 1916, when he was landed from the German submarine U-35 at the Croatian port of Cattaro.

On his return to Germany he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class and immediately posted back to regular service, commanding a succession of U-Boats in the Mediterranean and sinking several Allied ships before the war ended.

After such a war, what could the thirty-one-year-old Canaris do next for adventure? He began casting around to find a stage on which he could use his talents and his love of conspiracy. Politics was the obvious answer, and there was more than enough of it to go round in the chaos and revolution of post-Versailles Germany. In the early post-war years Canaris was deeply involved in combating the threat of communism, which at the time seemed poised to overwhelm Germany. He was an early activist in the formation of the anti-communist Freikorps paramilitary units which roamed the country. In this role he almost certainly had dealings with his old Iberian adversary Basil Zaharoff, who was at the time busy selling weapons from his German factories to anyone who would buy them.

In the post-Bismarck German constitutional settlement, the army’s position was almost that of a state within a state. High-level politics and high-level military command occupied a deeply enmeshed common space at the pinnacle of the German state, and often flowed into each other in a way unknown in most other European democracies. Although still only a very minor player, this was the space in which Wilhelm Canaris had now arrived, and the space in which he would, with only brief exceptions, spend the rest of his life.

But the young naval lieutenant’s hyperactivity in 1919 was not confined to politics and conspiracies. He was also pursuing romance.

His first love had been an English girl, Edith Hill, the daughter of a wealthy northern industrialist to whom Canaris, a lifelong anglophile, had become more or less engaged. At the outbreak of war, however, Miss Hill terminated the relationship on the grounds that it would be improper to marry a citizen of her nation’s enemy. Around 1917, probably after his well-publicised escape from South America, he met and fell in love with Erika Waag, also the daughter of an industrialist. When peace came, he assiduously tracked her down and, three days after finding her, proposed. They married in 1919, and went on to have two daughters. The marriage was not on the whole a contented one. Erika’s passion for music and the arts, and Wilhelm’s for politics and plotting, did not always sit easily together. Canaris was never likely to be the kind of man who would submit himself to uxorious domesticity.

In June 1923, doubtless in an attempt to keep him away from more political mischief, Canaris was posted to the cadet-training ship the Berlin, a superannuated pre-war cruiser which should have been despatched long ago to the breaker’s yard. He found his fellow officers boorish, the job monotonous, and his enforced exclusion from intrigue unbearable. Depression – always quite close to the surface of the Canaris personality – set in. He believed his naval career was over, and toyed with resignation.

The one bright spot in his life on the Berlin was a slim, fresh-faced, fair-haired young man with an artistic temperament and a high-pitched voice (he was nicknamed ‘Billy Goat’). Despite the age difference between Canaris and Reinhard Heydrich, there was much which brought the two men together. Heydrich was teased by his fellow cadets because of his effeminate appearance, just as Canaris had been teased for his short stature. Both men were outsiders. Neither found the upper-class overlay of life in the German navy either comfortable or congenial. Observers noted the ‘father and son’ relationship that developed between the two. On some occasions young cadet Heydrich, an accomplished violinist, would visit the Canaris home, where he accompanied Erika on the piano, while her husband, complete with chef’s hat, cooked his favourite dish, saddle of wild boar in a croute made of crumbled black bread and red wine. In the years to come, after Heydrich, then the head of Himmler’s Sicherheitsdienst (SD), had himself married, the Canarises and the Heydrichs would twice choose to live as neighbours in the same street.

After the war, Heydrich’s wife Lina described the relationship between the two couples: ‘Mrs Canaris played the violin and so soon we came to see each other frequently, and this social intercourse … was not to be interrupted until the death of my husband … We used to see each other on our birthday parties; the two men went hunting together; no festivities in our houses passed without our taking part in them … We had a picture of the Dresden in the Battle of the Falkland Isles. It was a present from Canaris; he had painted it himself.’

It seems that the relationship between the two couples was actually rather more complex than Lina Heydrich’s post-war description makes it seem. By the time they were next-door neighbours in the area around Berlin’s Schlachtensee lake there was already an atmosphere of wariness between the two men, neither of whom was averse to using his wife or his private contacts to keep an eye on the other. On one occasion Erika Canaris was invited to her next-door neighbours’ for an afternoon coffee party. She did not want to go, but Canaris insisted ‘for appearances’ sake’. At the event, Lina Heydrich, who was well aware that the Canaris’s daughter Eva had been severely incapacitated by meningitis, insisted that, in line with Hitler’s new policy of racial purification, ‘We have to kill all disabled children.’ In any normal relationship, this would have caused a permanent rupture between the two families. Instead, the neighbours’ habit of regular, if guarded, social contact seems to have continued uninterrupted. One of his anti-Hitler co-conspirators would later comment on Canaris’s puzzling habit of socialising with even the most extreme Nazis: ‘Canaris considered them to be thugs and crooks, but he had no objection to observing them. It was like living in some well-written crime story.’

Canaris’s ‘penal servitude’ on his cadet-training ship did not last long. In the spring of 1924, to his huge relief, he exchanged naval uniform for civilian clothes and went undercover again, this time in Japan, where he was engaged in a secret joint enterprise with the Japanese for the construction of the U-Boats Germany was prohibited from having under the terms of Versailles. But the project was stillborn when German defence policy changed from trying to deceive the Royal Navy about the building of illicit U-Boats to cooperating with it, in the hope of achieving some relaxation of the Versailles straitjacket.

Canaris was brought back to a Berlin desk job, which he hated with a passion that left him with a lifetime aversion to staff work, bureaucracies and all sedentary jobs. One of his superiors of this time noted perceptively, ‘His troubled soul is appeased only by the most difficult and unusual of tasks.’

True to form, a Berlin desk job did not hold Wilhelm Canaris, now thirty-seven, for long. By the end of 1924, despite government jitters, he was once again deep in backstreet dealings with right-wing bankers and his old spy networks in Spain,creating a series of front companies to cover another attempt at secret ship- and U-Boat-building, this time in Spain and Greece. It was not long before Canaris, assisted by his Mallorcan fisherman friend Juan March, had woven a powerful network of influence in Spain which included Argentine venture capitalists, German industrialists, Spanish shipbuilders, film-makers, bankers, the chief of the Spanish secret police, corrupt officials, government ministers, right-wing members of the Spanish aristocracy, and even the royal family. Inevitably, Canaris’s old adversary-cum-partner, the king of arms dealers, Basil Zaharoff, got to hear what was going on, and tipped off the British.

It was not only the British who now moved against Canaris. Thanks to his right-wing activities, he had made powerful enemies at home. Their chance came when one of Canaris’s front companies, the film-making enterprise Phoebus, went bankrupt. In the ensuing hullabaloo, his attempts to bypass the Versailles Treaty were exposed, along with his right-wing links. An embarrassment to the navy at home and abroad, he was hurriedly withdrawn from Spain and given a posting away from the public eye on another elderly training ship, the Schlesien, on which he served initially as first officer and then, from 30 September 1932, as captain.

It was in this post that, at Hitler’s review of the fleet in 1933, Canaris first met the new German chancellor. Hermann Göring too paid a visit to the Schlesien that year, but it was far less successful. The future head of the Luftwaffe, who was violently and incessantly seasick, took exception to being the butt of some rather laboured inter-service jokes at his expense from one of the Schlesien’s officers. Canaris had to discipline the officer to save his own career, after which the threat quickly passed.

The next crisis was more serious. Canaris liked to be in command, not under it – he was famous for his tetchy and truculent relations with his senior officers. In the late summer of 1934 his immediate superior complained to the head of the navy, Admiral Raeder, about Canaris’s behaviour. Raeder, who had already had to deal with the fallout from his difficult subordinate’s escapades in Spain and elsewhere, decided that enough was enough, and banished the troublemaker to command an isolated Napoleonic naval fortress at Swinemünde on the Baltic coast. Here Canaris whiled away his time cantering his horse along the deserted beach and waiting for something to come along.

In due course it did. In the last weeks of 1934, after an internal struggle between the army and the navy as to who should fill a vacancy at the head of the Abwehr, Canaris got the job. The fact that he was well known to be on very bad terms with Raeder may have helped. Although the Abwehr was officially the German foreign intelligence service, it was organisationally attached to the army general staff, making Canaris, though a senior naval officer, effectively an ‘adopted son’ of what was known at the time as the Reichswehr (the German army). Appointing Canaris, the Führer, an avid devotee of British spy novels, said, ‘What I want is something like the British Secret Service – an order, doing its work with passion.’

What Hitler saw in the forty-seven-year-old rear admiral (Canaris was promoted on his appointment) was a master right-wing conspirator who could be put to his service. What he didn’t see was the subtly independent spirit, sustained by a strong moral code and firm principles, that was hidden below.

The event which marked the greatest single service Wilhelm Canaris rendered his master during his early years as Abwehr chief began on 25 July 1936.

Returning that evening from Wilhelm Furtwängler’s triumphant production of Wagner’s Die Walküre at Bayreuth’s Festspiel opera house, Hitler was handed a personal letter from a largely unknown forty-three-year-old Spanish colonel called Francisco Franco Bahamonde. Franco, as he soon became known, was trapped in Morocco with 30,000 troops, unable to transport them over the Straits of Gibraltar to the Spanish mainland, where they were desperately needed to stem the advance of Republican forces threatening Seville, because of an embargo enforced by the Spanish navy. What he needed – and desperately – was aircraft to fly him and his men to the beleaguered Spanish city. He had appealed to Mussolini for help, but was refused. He now turned to Hitler.

Though the hour was late, Hitler called in Göring and the armed forces’ commander-in-chief, Werner von Blomberg. At the conclusion of discussions which ended in the early hours of the following morning, Hitler decided to throw his weight behind Franco. It now fell to Canaris to deliver the aid his master had promised. The one-time spy was in his element, using his old contacts in the Spanish government and secret police.

Twenty Junkers 52 transports (ten more than Franco had asked for) and six Heinkel 51 fighters, some flown by British pilots, were swiftly chartered through London – probably with the help of Basil Zaharoff – and despatched to Tetouan airfield in northern Morocco. This was followed by a massive build-up of military aid and arms from Berlin, including the deployment of the German Condor Legion, whose destruction of the defenceless little town of Guernica by bombers in April 1937 was to prove a harbinger of the fate of so many innocent towns and cities across Europe in the years to come. Canaris’s intervention tipped the balance of the Spanish Civil War in Franco’s favour. On 28 March 1939, Franco occupied Madrid. Three days later he was able finally to declare the victory that put an end to Spain’s long and bloody years of conflict.

Hitler’s gamble had paid off – he had now extended his influence to the westernmost limit of Europe. It had paid off for Canaris, too, who had achieved unrivalled influence and leverage with the Spanish dictator and his new government. Spain had become the Abwehr chief’s private playground and refuge – Franco even gave him a villa for his private use as a mark of his gratitude.

Like Ludwig Beck and Carl Goerdeler, Wilhelm Canaris had at first welcomed Hitler as a necessary evil to put Germany back on its feet. Also like his two soon-to-be fellow conspirators, he would become horrified by the blood, conflict and criminality of Hitler’s behaviour in power. But Canaris’s journey from naïve belief in Hitler to understanding the threat he posed to all that he himself stood for was a slow one – for which history has often criticised him.

The turning point in Canaris’s loyalty to his Führer finally came with the Fritsch affair in January 1938. This was the moment when it became evident to Canaris, as to so many of his fellow Germans, that Hitler’s demonic will would not be restrained by the norms of accepted behaviour, by the constraints of the law, or by the limits of democratic government. ‘If you are looking for one specific event that shook Canaris’s allegiance to Hitler, then there [in the Fritsch affair] you have it,’ commented his predecessor as chief of the Abwehr. Canaris’s subordinates in the Abwehr noted the change too: ‘Hitler’s criminal procedure against … Fritsch had a [profound] effect upon the Wehrmacht and the Abwehr. The result … split … opinion … The systematic organisation … among Hitler’s opponents began at this point. The final decision to work for the regime’s overthrow … by the [Canaris] group was … made [at this time],’ one reported after the war.

From this watershed onwards all the formidable energy and cunning of this part Hamlet, part moral mystic, part German patriot, part conspirator at the court of Cesare Borgia, would be directed towards undermining and frustrating his master, Adolf Hitler.

* Its full title was the Amtsgruppe Auslandsnachrichten und Abwehr.

4

Madeleine and Paul

The couple, he magnificent in the red-lined grey cape and gold-trimmed shako of a lieutenant colonel in the Austrian army, and she radiant in a spring dress, seemed like kingfishers flashing along a muddy river as they pushed their way through the tide of humanity pressing – panicking – to find a place on the train to Switzerland.

He led her to the platform and they said their goodbyes as lovers do when they are uncertain whether they will ever see each other again. Then he took her into a carriage, found her a seat amidst the crush, and left.

Three days previously, on 12 March 1938, she had watched the German troops marching into Vienna under brilliant skies. She had felt the tramp of their boots in the pit of her stomach, and heard their chants: ‘Today Vienna; tomorrow Prague; later Paris.’ And Madeleine Bihet-Richou, thirty-six years old, daughter of a French government official, native of Toulouse, divorcee, mother of a son, teacher of French in Vienna and for the last four years the lover of Erwin Lahousen Edler von Vivremont, the head of the Austrian Abwehr, had been frightened.

As Madeleine watched Hitler’s troops streaming into Vienna that day, her lover was with Wilhelm Canaris in Abwehr headquarters not far away. The admiral had dashed to the city by plane ahead of the forward troops in order to seize documents in Lahousen’s files. It would have been embarrassing, to say the least, if these had fallen into the hands of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, for they revealed the extent of cooperation between Canaris and his Austrian counterpart, which had included warnings and plans of the coming German invasion. With the German takeover imminent, Canaris asked Lahousen to gather as many of his most trusted colleagues as possible and join him in the Tirpitzufer in Berlin, adding, ‘Above all, don’t bring in any Nazis to our Berlin headquarters, bring me true Austrians, not thugs.’